Continuing the discussion from Test our new composer!:
I’d love to hear more about how you are making this work, as Confluence is quite widely used (but not necessarily loved) within my field. And I’ve often thought that Discourse could do the same job better - and a lot more at the same time.
The Berlin State Library — Germany’s largest academic library—and the Central and Regional Library Berlin — the country’s largest public library — have been developing concepts and strategies for several years to position Discourse as a comprehensive open-source alternative to enterprise intranet solutions such as Microsoft Teams/Sharepoint/Office368 or Atlassian Confluence.
This initiative spans a wide range of focus areas, including:
I am currently drafting a manifesto that outlines our core approach and expect to publish it here within the next few days.
Coincidentally, also in Berlin, we use Discourse at an enterprise level for a German automotive company; however, it was not adopted for the wiki. This was largely due to two things:
Discourse at an enterprise level as a wiki is extremely viable, but Confluence has this document hierarchy view on the left that management simply couldn’t let go of(see image below). The outcome was that they decided XWiki would be used as a wiki library, and Discourse would be used for peer-to-peer support, discussions, and questions.
Then, more than 12 months were spent failing to agree on how their tree hierarchy should be organized. The answer of course, is that data is complex and the tree structure really isn’t the best choice for the data we were working with. Ultimately, that went in favour of Discourse where we stuck to the recommended tag based organising, leant on search, and encouraged users to use plenty of hyperlinks.
An important part of this story is that we started in 2019, and the Discourse Knowledge Explorer changed in significant ways after these decisions were made. I believe it is now Discourse Doc Categories, which aligns far more with what we had envisioned and needed at the time.
But really it was the politics at enterprise level that made this hard. You will often get departments and decision-makers who act in their best interests rather than the company’s. We had aligned with the department that ultimately pushed xwiki, and had written agreement that Discourse would be the platform. 12 months later they announced out of nowhere, to the entire company that xwiki would be the new platform. What followed was 12 months of confused users, and incredibly difficult alignment talks that left me wondering if the juice was worth the squeeze. I’ll always maintain that it was, but I was definitely paying a large price personally for fighting these things, and consistently swimming against the tide.
I guess my key takeaway here is that at enterprise level, Discourse is a fantastic wiki tool - especially in software and technical fields. Further, in the right company culture it is a game changer.
The bigger problem in my experience was always the insane amount of politics required to establish the platform.
Just dropping a brief note to comment on a couple things here:
First yes, that’s the newer docs plugin which we intend to replace the old. We are using it here on meta for our documentation where it’s serving our purposes much better. It allows you to define the sections and pages that show in the sidebar navigation in the order that you want.
It’s still experimental in the sense that it hasn’t quite reached the maturity we think it needs to be widely supported – the main thing that’s needed is a more user friendly way to manage the indices that back the navigation in the sidebar.
Supporting deeper nesting is something that I expect we’ll do at some point as well.
We aren’t investing too heavily in the plugin at this very moment, but it is the foundation on which I expect we’ll be building more of these features when they become a priority and/or in collaboration with partners.
I appreciate your efforts to improve every day following your community’s needs. It’s the real value for each who understand it.
I kindly suggest that adding a more visible method to open the sidebar on Doc Categories would be the perfect complement to the ‘better go back’ improvement.
Our community is light years away from the standards and/or infrastructure that are sharing their experiences before, but I think that UI/UX is the key part of the universal language in the digital age we are living.
We all are benefiting from this continuous renovation. Give a moment of praise for me 
This is a partially related article; although they do not mention an open source collaboration tool, Discourse would fit in perfectly with what our Danish colleagues are doing:
